Web Services

It may seem like an unimportant issue, but web editors might be interested in reading a recent post from CSS-Tricks detailing good practice for writing URLs:

• Guidelines for URI Design

I was particularly struck by the URI ‘speech-friendly’ test: Can you easily say a URL down the phone to someone else, or do you have to pause between characters to say whether they’re lower/upper case? Do you have to describe any funny punctuation marks that appear? Is the URI unhelpfully long, and indeed does it even make any sense?

There have recently been a spate of new websites at UCL using ‘news tickers’ – banners of short headlines that  emerge across a space on a web page. These vary from each headline character appearing at short time intervals, to entire headlines slowly scrolling into view.

It seems that they’ve now been made particularly popular by the BBC News website’s use of such a ticker at the top of the page, showing ‘latest’ news stories. The new UCL homepage also uses a similar ticker which displays the most recent news articles on the site.

So why write a blog article on the ‘pros and cons’ of tickers? Surely tickers are consistently useful ways of disseminating new information to regular visitors of a site?

Tickers indeed are very useful for this, and for sites such as the BBC and UCL homepages which are guaranteed to have thousands of visitors who often revisit the site, they may well help those users quickly see what new features and happenings have taken place since their last visit. But what about the downsides?

1. Distracting users from key content

Have you ever been reading web page content when suddenly, something changes in the corner of your eye, and you look to see what’s happened? After realising that it’s just the ticker/animated .gif/annoying Flash advert, you go back to reading the content. Except you can’t find where you left off, and have to spend a few moments just trying to get back to the last sentence you read, and oh look, what just moved up at the top of the page?

Any content that moves on a page is going to cause some kind of distraction for visitors who are trying to read any length of content on a page. If a webpage is full of short chunks (such as the BBC and UCL home pages) this isn’t going to be such a big issue. But as soon as you introduce a few paragraphs, and actually expect your visitors to read them, tickers may not be such a good idea.

Another solution to this, again implemented in the UCL home page, is to allow users to actually pause the ticker if indeed it is causing too great a distraction for them.

2. Difficulties for users’ reading habits

In user tests for the 1997 sun.com website redesign, usability expert Jakob Nielsen got typical target users to look at different aspects of the website. One aspect was that of a scrolling ticker, which received negative feedback. Some users mentioned that ‘they were hard to read and time-consuming to interpret’; and that they ‘kept missing the the beginning of the text and thus had difficulty understanding what the message was about’.

If you’re trying to communicate vital information to users, is a ticker going to be the most suitable method, bearing in mind some users (including many dyslexics) will have real trouble reading from moving text? Some tickers, like the UCL homepage’s, will not suffer from this issue so badly, because the text itself isn’t moving. Others, in which full sentences pass from one side to the other, will certainly cause problems.

3. CPU

This is only something we’d noticed recently in our work on the UCL home page. There are quite a number of JavaScript tickers available that actually suck up an awful lot of CPU. One ticker we played with lately would actually bring our office PC’s CPU to 100% every time we opened the webpage in Firefox, which was quite irritating. Tickers already set up in the Silva CMS shouldn’t cause such problems, but if you do try to use other ticker scripts, it’s well worth checking this before implementing them!

Overall, tickers can have great potential for alerting regular users to news and changes to a website. However, it’s worth spending some time considering whether they will actually be of use to your website’s key user targets, or whether it will cause them more irritation than genuine help.

Common sense would insist that the way someone reads from a computer screen is going to be different from how they would read from paper. Indeed, many web pages throughout UCL are written in ways more easily digestible for the casual web surfer (shorter chunks of content with more concise information). Users can hopefully get to the exact information they need, and read it, in as short a time as possible.

However a recent study by Jakob Nielsen suggests that the way users read content is far more ‘magpie’ like and perhaps even lazier, than many of us had ever guessed.

Nielsen found that as readers ‘read’ hundreds of webpages, they read in a bizarre pattern, similar to the letter ‘F’. To quote the Chronicle of Higher Education article:

At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a lowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored.

With this in mind, perhaps we need to take a completely new look at the way that we present all kinds of content on our webpages. Can we really assume that casual users visiting a page will read the majority of its contents, or is it more likely that they’ll read the beginning and then look out for particular keywords?

Read the full article at:

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b01001.htm